


Diamond Hearts

by secretlyasummers



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 01:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16186931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretlyasummers/pseuds/secretlyasummers
Summary: In the immediate aftermath of the Phoenix shards leaving the Stepford sisters, the Cuckoos are having trouble with this whole emotion thing. Utopia-era.





	Diamond Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, folks, I just really like Phoenix: Warsong, okay?

Scott was woken from his sleep by a rapping at the door. Utopia was austere, spartan, and in a room of gunmetal gray and metal, a cushy bed was his only conceit to comfort. It was at Emma’s request – she and Warren had spent a lot of money buying a load of fancy king-sized beds – and Emma was cuddled up at Scott’s side, the comforter and sheets cocooned around them.  
  
Emma mumbled in her sleep, pulling herself closer to Scott, but someone rapped at the door again. Scott pushed himself up, gently moving Emma’s head off his side and onto the pillow. He made his way out of the bedroom, and through the little combination kitchen-living room that was the extent of their little apartment. He took a second to replace the goggles he slept in with a pair of ruby quartz sunglasses, his eyes screwed shut the whole time, and replaced the goggles in their case.  
  
Whomever it was knocked on the door for a third time, and Scott finally got to and opened the door. It was the three Stepford girls: Mindee, Phoebe, and Celeste. They clearly hadn’t been sleeping, and looked haggard, at best. No makeup, their hair frizzy and tangled, and instead of an X-Men uniform or the school-girl clothing they normally wore, were wearing some ratty old pajamas.  
  
“Ah . . . ,” Scott rubbed his head, trying to shake off sleep. “Is there something wrong, girls? Do I need to get the team together?”  
  
“No!” Celeste was emphatic, surprisingly so.  
  
“Cel—”  
  
“No, we don’t – it’s not important.” Celeste interrupted Mindee, continuing. “It’s not important. W-we shouldn’t have come. You can go back to sleep.”  
  
“Don’t listen to Celeste, Mister Summers.” Phoebe was holding Celeste’s hand, squeezing it tight. “Um, if you don’t mind, and if it’s not a problem, can you, um . . .” She paused, shook her head for a moment, and Mindee finished the thought.  
  
“Can we talk to mother, please? To Miss Frost?”  
  
None of them looked comfortable. Had Scott been less groggy, and more alert, he’d have realized how much the ice queen Stepford Sisters hated looking weak, and how much that request must have taken from them.  
  
“If it’s important.” Scott took a second, and then rethought. “Just . . . why don’t you come in, girls. Sit down, or . . . something.” He pushed the door open, and one by one, but keeping close to each other, still, the Cuckoos came inside. Celeste sat down, primly, on the little couch they had, while Phoebe sprawled next to her. Mindee stayed up, pacing, walking back and forth in a tight little circuit.  
  
“Do you want coffee, or anything?” Scott was putting on a pot for himself, but the Cuckoos nodded no, simultaneously. “Right. Just . . . hold on a second. I’ll get Ems.”  
  
Scott put down the coffee pot, and went into the little bedroom at the back. He paused for a second, though, looking back over his shoulder. There was something off about them. Celeste was shaking, trying to keep up the Stepford Cuckoo creepy psychic façade but clearly failing, while Phoebe had pulled her knees to her chest and Mindee kept pacing.  
  
Scott sat on the bed, next to Emma, and gently nudged her. “Emma,” he whispered, but she just mumbled something incoherent and turned her head. “Emma Grace,” Scott said, more emphatically, and nudging her a little harder.  
  
“Ah!” Emma shot up, reflexively turning to diamond for a second, then back to flesh. “Who’s attacking? What’s the situation? I’ll get to Cerebro and—”  
  
“No, no, Emma, it’s not—there’s no attack.” Scott raised his hands, for a second, then put them back down. “It’s the Cuckoos. They wanted to talk with you. There’s something wrong, I think. I’m not sure what.”  
  
“Okay. Okay.” Emma smoothed down her hair. “How do I look?”  
  
“Fantastic.”  
  
“Scott, darling, I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.” Emma sighed, and looked at her clock. “I’m just . . . okay.” Emma swung her legs out, and stood up. She waved a hand, and the ratty old Xavier School T-Shirt and boxer shorts transformed into a seven-hundred-dollar Bergdorf Goodman set of pajamas. “Not my finest illusions, but it will suffice.”  
  
Emma pushed open the door, while Scott stayed behind, going over some old after-action reports. The Stepford Cuckoos had clustered together, Mindee now sitting on the floor in front of her sisters. “What can I do for you, sweethearts?” Emma grimaced for a moment. “I’d assume it’s important if you decide it was worthy waking me up at this ungodly hour.”  
  
“No, you’re right.” Celeste was nervously wringing her hands. “We-we can just go back. I – we’re – sorry.” She stood up, looking expectantly to her sisters.   
  
“Sit down, Celeste dear.” Emma knew deflection when she heard it. “I’m clearly already awake. Out with it.”  
  
Mindee, sitting on the floor, instead of on the couch like Phoebe and Celeste, didn’t look up to Emma. “During the fight, last morning. With the Predator X creatures. We were helping Mister Summers coordinate the X-Men teams when . . . when the Phoenix shards that we had, they left.”  
  
Phoebe picked up the train of thought. “The bits of our hearts that we had kept in our diamond forms, to keep the Phoenix Force contained. We could turn them back into normal. After so long.”  
  
Emma nodded. The X-Men had gotten in a fight at the World, the mechanized factory of Weapon Plus, when the origins of the Stepford sisters had been revealed. The Phoenix Force had come, sensing their psychic power, and after a brief stint under John Sublime’s control, had destroyed the thousand other Stepford clones that the World had made, and was expelled by the Stepford girls. That is, expelled but for a small shard, trapped in them, forcing them to keep their hearts in diamond. And in diamond form, the Stepford girls couldn’t feel. For years now, the Cuckoos hadn’t experienced a single emotion.  
  
“I’m sorry, girls.” Emma looked each of them in the eye. “I’m afraid, however, that I’m not Miss Grey, and claim no knowledge of the firebird’s whereabouts.”  
  
“No! That’s not—”  
  
“Cel, don’t yell.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
Mindee picked up for her sister. “We don’t mind not having the Phoenix, Miss Frost. It’s that, that—we don’t know what we should feel, anymore. It’s so confusing, and . . . and—"  
  
Phoebe was sniffling. “And everyone, they’re all thinking so loud, and it’s all so hard to keep out. People keep saying things and thinking things and we don’t know what to do. We hate this, and hate being this, and we want this all to be different. Can you just . . . I don’t know, fix something?”  
  
“Just put us back, Miss Frost. Please?” Mindee was looking at her expectantly. “Please. We feel . . .” She shook her head. “We don’t know the right words. Like there’s something heavy in my chest, and I can’t sit steady, and, and . . . I don’t know.”  
  
Celeste didn’t speak, just nervously wringing her hands, her head nervously flickering back and forth, till Phoebe’s hand grabbed hers, quickly.  
  
“Oh, my darlings . . .” Emma scooted closer to the three of them on the couch. “I . . .” Emma Frost was, past the White Queen and the Headmistress and all that, a person of intense, radical compassion. She had fought and nearly died for the children in her care again and again, killed and mutilated protecting them. But she wasn’t a person who was that good with expressing that she cared for people. With helping them, emotionally.  
  
“I’m sorry.” Emma saw those three funhouse mirror images of her, each just crackling with fear, terror, and nervous energy, and didn’t know what to do. “I really am. But Phoebe, Mindee, Celeste . . . I won’t lobotomize you. I can’t do that to you.”  
  
“Mother, please!” Celeste was nervously twirling her hair with her free hand. “I can’t live like this! It’s not right! Not after—” Celeste cut herself off. “I killed them, mother. Our sisters . . .” She trailed off, looking anywhere except where Emma was looking.  
  
When the Phoenix had come at the World, when it had killed the thousand other Stepford clones that John Sublime had stashed away, it had been Celeste’s hand that it had used. Emma could feel, at the edge of her telepathic awareness, a humming as the Cuckoos communicated furiously in their telepathic hive-mind.  
  
“She’s been on this for a while now, Miss Frost,” Mindee said. “Cel keeps going after herself.”  
  
“Maybe she should be,” Phoebe mumbled.  
  
Mindee continued over her. “And we’ve all had a chance to think about it, but we haven’t been able to feel about it until now. It’s-we’re new to this, Miss Frost. We don’t know what to do.”  
  
Emma nodded. “My feelings in this have always been clear. It was my daughters that the Phoenix killed, just as much as they were your sisters. And make no mistake, I have all intentions for there to be a reckoning for that one day. But all fault rests with the Phoenix, Celeste, not you.”  
  
“I remember raising my hand, and . . . and I remember the smell as they all burned. And it still hurts. It’s like . . .” Celeste’s eyes flicked to her sisters, then to Emma, for just a moment, as she searched for the right words to express herself. “Like I got punched in the gut, or, or something.”  
  
“And not over just that, Miss Frost.” Phoebe joined in. “All these things that hurt to think about. Like the Purifier attack, or Esme and Sophie, and what happened to poor Professor Grey, and what it looked like when the school was destroyed, or when Norman Osborn had taken Mindee, or . . .”  
  
“Or dumb things, too.” Mindee continued. “Like this evening, when Anole was on the phone with his parents. We couldn’t even just . . . I don’t know. Handle it.”  
  
“These are emotions, girls. They’re normal to feel. And it can be hard. I know that better then most, it can be hard.” Emma took a second, figuring out what to say. “And, yes, it’s going to hurt. Probably forever. And there will be times when it hurts too much, and you just want to stop. But that’s what everyone feels, and part of being a mutant – of being a human – is learning to live with that. To be able to take that and keep on going, to keep on living.”  
  
Emma rubbed one of her eyes. “In the morning, I can talk to Hank. We can find you a therapist. That might help.”  
  
The girls were quiet for a second, then another, till Celeste got up the will to speak. “Can we just . . . stay here, for the rest of the night?”  
  
“I’m not sure—”  
  
“Please, mother?” That was Phoebe. “Just tonight.”  
  
Emma relented. “Just wait, for a moment.” She stood up, and pushed open the door to the little bedroom. Scott was still awake, working on paperwork.  
  
“Is everything alright?” He put down his pen.  
  
“Not really, no.” Emma snatched up one of their laptops.  
  
“Anything I can do?”  
  
“No, darling, but it was kind of you to ask.”  
  
Emma left the little bedroom, and sat back down on the couch. She took a second, and patted the spot on the couch next to her. “Mindee, if you want to?”  
  
Mindee dutifully got up from the floor, and sat next to Emma.  
  
“This movie was one of my favorites when I was younger. Clash of the Titans. With Harry Hamlin. I’d wager you’d like it.”  
  
When Scott finished his paperwork and left for the Danger Room several hours later, he found the Cuckoos curled up with their mother, all four soundly asleep. Phoebe and Mindee resting on Emma, with Celeste’s head in Phoebe’s lap.


End file.
